A blog about writing, science fiction, the future of publishing, books and me.

Monday, January 11, 2010

My writing week year 3 week 1

Hi all,

Last week was a very hectic week that finished with a heat wave, giving me good reasons for doing very little writing. Our attempts to get my father out of hospital and into a nursery home took up a lot of time. We finally succeeded yesterday. I have no idea what my father thought of the whole idea because the hospital had drugged him up to the eyeballs. All he did was wander around, showing very little interest in the room in which he is probably going to spend the rest of his life.

To illustrate how drugged he was, he turned up to the nursing home with his jumper on backwards and no shirt on, he also, for reasons unknown to everyone, had put a pair of latex gloves on his feet and then two pairs of socks. Not impressed with the way the hospital let him dress. It wasn't a great day for a transfer, with the temperature hitting 42.

To top all that stress off, or maybe because of it, my left eye, which has had cataract surgery performed on it, developed a twitch every time I forced a blink. I don't think I am blinking enough at the moment. I did read a bit last week so it could just be eye strain caused by wearing glasses whose lenses are more suited to the right eye. I swapped down to weaker glasses.

I have started writing a story where the main character suffers form a particular trait. Can you guess? I will tell you at the end of the post. I also did a bit of editing of Stalking Tigers. I am currently editing chapter 10, which used to be chapter 14 before I cut chapters 11-13.

This information is a few weeks old as I am still yet to catch up my newspaper reading: a University of Melbourne book industry study says in the year 2007-08 there were 994 genuine commercial publishers in Australia who published 9910 new titles and sold 175-200 million books. The top 10 publishers accounted for 60 percent of sales. Now for those who are trying to get published comes the bad news, ninety per cent of publishers sold fewer than 120 copies of new titles, and fifty per cent sold less than five. No wonder publishers seem reluctant to take on new authors.

The main character in my short story suffers from dementia. For those who guessed cataracts, he might also end up with them.